Hopefully we just had the final snow of the season here in northern Ohio. I thought it was a good time to take a look at my gear heading into the spring. I’ve always been a fan of Diawa rods. But I haven’t used one since a catfish took my Diawa Sweepfire rod fishing at Wallace Lake one evening about 12 years ago. That night I was forced to go to my “backup” Fenwick 6’6” Bass rod and I have been using it ever since.
So for this coming summer I bought 3 Diawa rods, all fast action. I got one 7’ Crossfire medium weight for Bass, and two 6’6” Procyon light weight for Bluegill (one for my wife and one for me)
A few years ago I got my wife a pink and black Ugly Stick as an introduction to bass. Really this was more of a introduction to fishing, it was the whole package: learning how to cast, learning how to cast different lures, spinning reels, retrieval… She wants to do more fishing, and I want to take her out to more locations, but my favorite type of fish to eat are bluegill, and she only has a bass rod.
So here is the controversy I want to start. Lots of companies have abandoned their “light” weight product line and substituted the “ultra light”. Or if they still have “light” it’s 1 model, it only comes in 4’6”, and it’s a medium action at best. How the hell am I supposed to cast a lead bodied ant to the other side of a pond / inland lake with something that’s shorter than me and as rigid as an over cooked spaghetti noodle?
I’m serious, I purged my fishing rods when I turned 30. I cut down from 30 rods to 2. Every year for my birthday my old buddy CF gave me a SilStar rod. It became time to pass those on to others. Since the spring of 2005 I have had a 6’6” St. Croix, light weight, fast action, rod for Bluegill. But I didn’t want to take that rod out while I teach my wife, or others (friends children) to fish. So I got a Diawa Procyon for myself as well.
It took an entire weekend of searching to find a reasonably priced 6’6” light weight rod, Berkley, Shakespeare, Ugly Stick… the search options on their website sucked. It took until today clicking one model at a time and having to expand specs on each model number to finally 4 days later find that Ugly Stick makes a 6’6” light weight 2 peice spinning rods. But they still don’t state what the action is. I spoke to a few people and when they heard I wanted a 6’6” light weight fast action spinning rod no one knew of any. They had medium, or ultralight. The one guy, I have to quote, “I don’t know man, that sounds like a custom rig to me.”
A custom rig! A custom rig! This is northern Ohio! We live on Lake Erie! It’s the 11th largest lake in the world! It’s surface area is 9,910 square miles! But the great fishing rod seller at my local store tells me a 6 foot 6 inch, light weight, fast action, 2 piece, spinning rod is a custom rig.